Grim Tidings

by Caitlin Kittredge

  “Can you tell us what happened?” Hank said. I could have slapped him. You didn’t just start asking a cop questions at a roadblock.

  “Looks like some kind of industrial accident,” she said. “Probably nothing, but you know how the three-letter brigade gets. All that money from Homeland Security and not a terrorist to spend it on.”

  “Thank you, Officer,” Hank said. “We’ll be on our way.”

  She smiled—actually smiled—at Hank and stepped back, gesturing where we should turn around. “Drive,” Hank said. “Drive away and observe the speed limit.”

  “Because I was going to drift-race the ATF down the highway . . .” I muttered. Industrial accident my ass.

  “This is all wrong,” Hank said. He was flipping pages in his planner so fast they fluttered like wings, and he was pale and panting.

  “I’ll say,” I said.

  “No,” Hank said sharply. “I saw us coming here before all this happened. Before the quarantine, before he actually attacked anyone else.”

  “Back up,” I said, taking the turnoff for the town the trooper had mentioned. “Quarantine?”

  “You did something!” Hank shouted, slamming the book shut. “Something changed and I don’t know what’s going to happen now!”

  “Hank, I like you,” I said, gripping the wheel. “But if you keep yelling at me I’m going to leave you on the side of the road for the zompires.”

  “Look out!” he screamed, and I swerved as I almost hit a blond woman waving at me frantically from the shoulder. I hit the brakes, and we fishtailed to a stop a few yards past her.

  “Don’t stop!” Hank barked at me. “Things are already messed up enough!”

  “This?” I said as I opened the door. “This right here? It’s reminding me of all the reasons I hate human beings.” I walked back toward the woman, who blew out a huff of relief when she saw me.

  “I’m real sorry about that,” she said. “I can’t get a signal and I ran my damn car off the road swerving to avoid one of those things.”

  I took her in by the glow of her car’s one headlight. The other was crushed up against the cement liner of the drainage ditch next to the road, and a little steam whisped out from under the hood. She was tall, stocky, hair in a pixie cut that flopped over one eye. She was pretty striking, but her looks weren’t nearly as interesting to me as the shiny shield clipped to her men’s leather belt. “Things?” I said, and she chewed on her bottom lip.

  “I hit my head,” she said. “I don’t know what I’m saying.”

  “The dead people,” I said, figuring the worst thing she could do was shoot me or call me crazy. “If you saw one we shouldn’t be standing out in the open. It’s sort of like throwing sandwiches at attack dogs.”

  “Only one I saw up close is wrapped around my front axle,” she said. “Had a bad thirty seconds before I realized I hadn’t killed somebody.”

  She gestured over to her car and I approached the ditch, realizing the hiss I was hearing didn’t come from the radiator. The thing trapped under the car had been a teenage girl at one point, I was fairly sure. Her bloody, stained jacket had the name of a high school on it.

  The mark was plain as day on her forehead.

  She smelled me, and her mouth lolled open, thick black tongue flicking out. She moaned, one arm trying to reach for me, but her elbow had been knocked out of joint and it flopped uselessly against the concrete.

  “What agency are you?” the woman I’d almost hit said, coming to stand a few feet behind me. “Not law enforcement. No fed would drive that shitty truck. You one of the folks setting up the big tents? The CDC or whatever?”

  “Or whatever,” I echoed, still staring at the thing trapped under her car.

  “So what do we do?” she said. “I’m not a person who can’t admit when she’s out of her depth. I am out of my depth, out in the ocean with the fucking waves crashing over my head.”

  The thing under the car snapped its teeth, gurgling as it tried to worm its way out from under the hulk of metal. The spine had to be severed, but that hunger lighting it up inside didn’t care.

  I looked back at her. “Cut off the head and burn the body.”

  “Riiiiight,” she drawled. “You do see this badge? You do realize that even if I wanted to, I can’t go all Van Helsing on a civilian?”

  “Van Helsing used a stake,” Hank said helpfully. “Also he’s not real.”

  “Get back in the car!” I snapped at him.

  The cop reached into the backseat of her car and withdrew a coat and a satchel full of files. Avoiding the thing under the wheels, she slid through the front passenger window and retrieved three spare clips for her pistol, shoving them in a pocket. “You can take me into town. The staging area for the quarantine is there.”

  “There’s the small matter of the walking dead over here,” Hank said. I bored into him with my standard death glare, but he seemed not to notice. “You should definitely listen to her, Ms. . . .”

  “It’s lieutenant,” the cop said. “Lieutenant Beatrice Valley, KSP. And I don’t need to listen to any whack job telling me to burn bodies. What I need is to find whoever is heading up the quarantine because I have something they need to see.”

  “Okay,” I said. “Okay.”

  “Thank you,” she muttered testily, climbing into the front seat and forcing Hank to sit behind her. He gave me an alarmed, bugeyed look and I shook my head. This might be all wrong and it might not, but it was definitely all bad and getting a closer look escorted by a badge couldn’t hurt. Rushing in headlong was not something that kept you breathing for any length of time. I preferred to prowl around, scout the perimeter, poke and prod a little before I dove in, especially to a pool of Cain’s latest and greatest edition of the zombie apocalypse.

  I pointed Ronnie’s truck down the road toward the town. It was like any other pin-size map speck you’d drive through at seventy miles an hour—fast-food joints and gas stations in the outer ring, a big-box store, and a mile or so farther a downtown that had been dilapidated and shut down long before the Walking Man showed up. A temporary chain link fence topped with barbed wire stopped us, guarded by two guys in ill-fitting uniforms. The local National Guard, I guessed—they didn’t look comfortable enough to be regular army.

  Valley flashed her badge, but that didn’t get us anywhere. “No local PD. Homeland’s taken over,” one said. “It’s a biological attack.”

  “Yeah, I’m a state trooper, not a doughnut sucker, and I’m pretty sure it’s not the kind of attack you’re thinking of,” Valley said, leaning across my lap. “I need to speak to whoever is in charge. Preferably somebody with ‘Doctor’ in front of their name.”

  The guy in the uniform looked at Hank and me. “What about you two?”

  “They’re with me,” Valley snapped. She was mean enough, because after some garbled talk on the radio, the gate rolled back and I pulled forward into the no-man’s-land between an inner and outer fence. Inside, I could see green tents, temporary floodlights on poles, and a big white tent with one of those plastic antechambers eggheads set up when they were convinced they were dealing with something contagious.

  I felt my insides sink another couple of feet. All of these people were probably going to be dead soon, if nobody figured out what they were dealing with.

  I waited for the second gate to open, but instead something slammed into my window, and I saw myself looking into the barrel of a rifle. The guy holding it did fit into his uniform, and the patches let me know that he wasn’t just regular army, but the kind of guy they send in only when shit has well and truly hit the fan.

  “Out!” he hollered, then ripped open the door and grabbed me by the collar, throwing me on the ground. Looking across under the car I saw Valley get the same treatment and heard a yelp as a third soldier manhandled Hank.

  “What the fuck are you doing?!” Valley was yelling. “I am a Kansas State Police officer!”

  I stayed quiet. I didn’t fight the z
ip-tie handcuffs and I tried not to flinch when somebody shined a light in my face and patted me down for weapons. All they found was my pocket knife, which they took away before marching Hank and me to a metal hut near the white tent and shoving us both inside. They took Valley somewhere else, with her hollering protest all the way.

  “This is just perfect,” Hank said, pressing his hands over his face when the door slammed and locked. The hut had a few metal benches bolted to the walls, and some lockers that were all shut up tight.

  “That we’re trapped in the center of an outbreak or that we’re being held prisoner in a locker room?” I said. “Because if things go south, a place with a lock on the door is a lot better than a tent.”

  “I told you this was all wrong,” he grumbled.

  “And for the tenth time, I didn’t do anything!” I yelled. “I didn’t ask to be here, Hank, unlike you. You had a chance to stay home like a normal person and instead you went chasing after things that have nothing to do with you.”

  “If the world turns into a buffet for the undead, I think it will affect him, Ava,” Uriel said. I whipped my head to look at him, where he stood in the corner of the locker room.

  “Look who decided to show up,” I said. Uriel looked toward the door.

  “Not what either of us expected,” he said. “Things are moving a lot faster than I thought.”

  “I doubt any of this is a surprise to you,” I muttered. “You’ve got that all-seeing-angel thing going on.”

  “Ava, I’m hardly omnipotent,” Uriel said. He started to say more, then glanced past me at Hank. “What’s wrong with him?”

  I turned to see Hank’s mouth working like a hooked bass as he stared up at Uriel. “Holy shit,” he said. “You’re an angel.”

  Uriel looked back at me. “He can see me?”

  I shrugged. “He’s psychic.”

  Uriel narrowed his eyes at Hank. “Stop looking at me. Staring is very rude.”

  “So are you going to let us out of here to kill the zompire army or what?” I asked Uriel. “I assume that’s why you’re here. You can save the pep talk. I get what my job is.”

  “You misunderstand me,” Uriel said. “This is not the Walking Man’s design. I don’t believe he’s even here any longer.”

  “Then what?” I demanded, massaging the point between my eyes with my thumbs. “Enlighten us, oh great sage.”

  “This is noisy and frightening, but this isn’t the end I would expect from a creature like him,” Uriel said quietly. “There isn’t any point to this.”

  I looked up at him. The light was down to a single flickering bulb and Uriel’s profile looked like it was carved from the same stuff as the metal walls around us. “This is a distraction,” I said.

  Uriel nodded. “I can help you get out of this town, but between the Kingdom’s weapon ending up in the hands of a reaper and this, you need to do what I asked and stop the Walking Man.” He leaned in so only I could hear him. “Stop him and you stop the Fallen pulling his strings. If you could kill them both I’d appreciate it.”

  “You got a tornado in your back pocket?” I muttered. Uriel frowned, confused, and I waved him off. “Never mind.”

  “What do you want to do about the walking crew cut?” he said in the same soft tone. “I say leave him to a vacation in Guantánamo Bay.”

  I rolled my eyes. “Be nice.”

  “Angels aren’t nice,” he said. “Have you even read a single page of the Bible? We are judgmental and avenging and occasionally we destroy the earth with floods, but we’re not nice.”

  “I’m freaking out,” Hank stated. “I have asthma. You can’t get me excited like this . . .”

  “Hank, you better calm yourself,” I snapped as something banged on the outside of the shed. “Because the next thing that comes through the door might be way worse than an angel.”

  CHAPTER

  14

  Valley stuck her head through the door, and I was almost glad to see her. “Hey,” she said. “I managed to convince Mr. Male-Pattern Baldness in the windbreaker I’m not a threat to national security, but the bad news is you two are quarantined.”

  “What?” Hank exclaimed as one of the soldiers ushered us out. “But we’re not sick!”

  “You’ll be tested and then you can go about your business,” Valley said. “Oh, and if you have ID, strap it on. They’re real sticklers around here.”

  She was still holding the satchel, and I realized the files poking out of it were bent and stained, their edges yellowing, type so smeared with age I couldn’t read the tab headings.

  Hank cleared his throat behind me and I turned around to shoot him a fresh dose of death glare. “Sure thing,” I said to Valley. More huge, uniformed guys with M-4s strapped on marched us to the white tent and shunted inside with half a dozen other people who weren’t with the military or the police. One of them had on a fast-food uniform, and a pair of men wore matching jumpsuits covered in grease stains. Their names were embroidered above their hearts. “Well, hey,” one of them said. “Looks like we’re getting some new party guests.”

  “Sit tight, you two,” Valley said. “I’ll be back soon.”

  The girl in the uniform looked up at us. “So what are you in for?”

  “Wrong place, wrong time,” Hank said. She sighed.

  “All of us were too stupid to listen to the evacuation order. Or let their boyfriend talk them into staying.” She glared at the shorter of the two jumpsuit guys and he heaved a sigh.

  “Baby, how was I supposed to know a stupid emergency broadcast would turn into this?”

  “You’re an idiot!” she shouted. “This is just like when you promised we’d go to Branson for my birthday and you got drunk at the dog track and bet it all because the dog had the same name as your mom!”

  He started to yell back, but his jaw just lolled, a little drool coming from it. “Oh, that’s cute,” his girlfriend snarled, before she swayed and fell over, limp as a severed limb.

  I didn’t last much longer—just enough to see the six strangers and Hank drool, sway, and pass out. I tried to head for the door, but it was down a corridor, one that twisted and turned, impossibly long, and the door shrank until I could put it in the palm of my hand.

  The floor wasn’t a floor anymore but soft tropical waves, and puffy white clouds coated my vision as it swayed gently. I let out a short giggle. A hellhound who could walk on water. That was something you didn’t see every day.

  I saw the shapes approaching, shadows on my perfect, warm little world, and I let them lift me up and take me away, not really caring where I ended up.

  Cool droplets peppered my face, and I felt wet earth pressed into my cheek. My vision swam from the gas and all I could see were two pale tree trunks nearby. I wanted to stay in the woods, feeling the rain. I wanted to let go and sleep.

  The trees swayed, but there was no wind. I blinked, and felt something sticky coating my eyelashes. I smelled rusty metal and realized that the wet on my face wasn’t rain, and the pale stalks in front of me weren’t faraway trees, they were a pair of human legs, close up.

  Without moving, I rolled my gaze up and saw a naked woman standing over me. Deep scratches marked her torso, like she’d crawled through a barbed wire fence, and blood dribbled from her mouth in a steady stream, pooling at her chin and spattering me.

  I dug my fingernails deep into the soft ground under me, willing myself not to move. The creature let out a deep, pained wheeze, scenting me to see if I was alive or like her. As she crouched, reaching out a hand to scrabble at the leather of my jacket, I tensed every muscle. I was going to have to be quick, and hope that Cain’s children didn’t have the same taste for hellhound blood as for human.

  While she muttered and poked at me, more droplets hitting me like I was under a faucet, I scouted my surroundings. I was in a yard, in front of a dumpy ranch house that had probably gone up around the time I last saw Cain. All the houses around us were dark, and the street bore the sort
of litter left behind when a neighborhood clears out in a hurry. A sheet of newspaper blew against the flimsy picket fence separating the yard from the street, and the creature jerked up, hissing at it.

  I sprang up, changing on the fly and hitting the dirt again on four paws. I dug in with my nails, clearing the fence in one spring and sprinting down the center of the street.

  Behind me, the creature screamed, and an answer echoed off the slope-roofed houses around us. I put my head down and ran faster. I didn’t know what had happened back in the enclosure—I didn’t know if Hank was alive, where Valley was, why we’d all been gassed. Maybe they thought we were infected. But if that was the case, why dump us back in town?

  I got my answer when a much shriller, more human scream caught me from down a broad avenue outside the little neighborhood, and I saw the girl who’d cussed out her boyfriend inside the tent go down under a pile of three creatures. I stopped, padding silently on the asphalt, but there was nothing I could do. They’d already ripped her throat out, cupping the blood in their hands and slurping it like dying men in a desert. The air filled with the scent of new pennies and the stench of unwashed, decaying flesh.

  I didn’t feel sorry for the girl as I growled and drew back into the shadows of a filling station on the corner. She’d be awake soon enough, and just as ready to rip my throat out.

  “Ava!”

  I swung my head around, snarling. I could talk, but it was in hellhound language and it all sounds the same to humans. Hank peered out from the door of the filling station, pushing it open an inch or two and beckoning me inside. “Hurry!” he said as the creatures let out a series of hoots, already raising their heads to scent for the next target—and turning right toward Hank. I trotted inside, turning to shove the door shut with my snout. Hank’s shirt was soaked, pits to waist, and he probably smelled like a rack of baby-back ribs to the things in the street.

  “Thank God it’s you,” he said, turning the lock. “Everyone else is dead.”

  I whined, looking at the window as the three creatures were joined by the one who’d been testing out the idea of eating me back in the yard. They started creeping toward us in a wedge shape, like how wolves hunt. If I knew my apex predators, there were probably two or three more on the roof of the station, waiting for us to run out the back.